Aliens and androids invade Exhibition
FOR BIG DREAMERS: Inspiring 5,000-square-foot exhibit
Science nerds and sci-fi fans, the PNE has the exhibit just for you this year.
Alien Worlds and Androids is an exploration of robots and cosmic landscapes real and imagined, and how science is often closer to fiction than you might think. Masterminded by creative director Eddie Newquist and his team at Global Experience Specialists, Alien Worlds and Androids is a 5,000-square-foot exhibit created in conjunction with NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The show features an assortment of familiar sci-fi characters, including Star Wars’ C-3PO and Marvel’s Iron Man, and details how some of the mechanisms that make these robots function have also been applied on Earth and in space. Alien environments and life forms on display range from the microscopic to the far-flung and fantastic.
“We work with a lot of partners and science museums,” Newquist said in a phone interview from Los Angeles. “When we ask astronauts, ‘What inspires you every day?’ they always look back to their childhoods or time with their family where their imagination was running a little bit wild with science fiction. It really inspires you to dream.
“It’s an interactive exhibit so you can use a robot arm to build a cube structure; there’s touch screens that let you build your own robot; you can sit in and take a journey with the Mars explorers,” he added. “It’s funny: Books and films would inspire a lot of our astronauts, and NASA’s computer graphics of what missions might look like are now inspiring a lot of new science fiction writers and even film.”
Newquist has a long of history with film and science fiction, having worked on exhibits for movies like Twister and Apollo 13. He has collaborated with James Cameron, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, among others. Current touring exhibits by GES include Harry Potter: The Exhibit, which was shown in Canada in Toronto (2010) and Edmonton (2014). GES is currently developing an Avatar-based presentation focused on the world of Pandora.
One of the first major projects Newquist worked on was the space exploration ride Tour of the Universe presented at Toronto’s CN Tower in the 1980s. The exhibit was designed by special effects trailblazer Douglas Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Silent Running), who was Newquist’s childhood hero and ended up being his first boss.
“I interviewed and got an internship and was put on the effects stage and started to learn. I got to know Doug very well — an incredible man,” Newquist said. “Tour of the Universe was the first public motion simulation ride ever. We did that in ’85 and it opened in ’86. And then Star Tours (a motion simulator based on Star Wars) took that same technology and developed it at Disneyland. I was an effects assistant with Doug and the entire film team while I was still a senior in college.”
So dream big, kids.
Alien Worlds and Androids
Until Sept. 5 (closed Aug. 22 & 29), 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. | Garden Auditorium, Pacific National Exhibition
Tickets: Free with gate admission, more info at pne.ca